Moving in Madrid

March 1, 2019March 1, 2019 Joseph Lyttleton5 Comments

I have a new home. That makes 25 in 35 years.

Moving days

On September 1, 2017, like so many September Firsts before it, I moved. Not from one US city to another, but from NYC to Madrid. As of today, I have been in Spain for exactly a year and a half. Of the 13 cities I have called home in my life, I have lived in Madrid the third longest amount of time.

At home in Madrid

I came to Madrid to teach English; rather, I used teaching English as an excuse to come to Madrid. Upon arriving, I joined with friends to finagle our way into a flat on Calle de Alcalá, a historical street that bisects the city, cutting a diagonal line through Madrid’s center. That four-bedroom flat was imbued with unassuming charm and the Madrileño aesthetic of a generation that had known life under Franco.

I technically lived in that flat for about nine months, enough time for one roommate to be replaced by another and the group to settle into individuals routine. While I lived there, most of my income came from online English tutoring, a workable if not consistent (or consistently enjoyable) endeavor.

Though I’ve given up teaching online, for a few hours a week, I still teach/tutor English to working adults and a couple preteen boys. The majority of my income, though, comes from a variety of freelance editing/writing gigs. Freelancing is both the worst and most OK way to work. It’s the definition of sufficient.

My 18 months in Madrid have been good – okay to great depending on the day. Early on, though, it become clear that my new life was just another version of the lives I had lived in all the other cities I had passed through. I worked, I drank, I wandered, I met people, I washed, I rinsed, I repeated. Okay to great, usually somewhere in between.

But, in March of last year, I met Helen.

Malasaña

Helen celebrated her tenth anniversary in Madrid back in January. For almost every day of those ten years, she has lived in various flats in Malasaña, a rapidly evolving neighborhood that in roughly a generation has turned from an at-times dangerous barrio to one of the hippest (and most expensive) places to live. Yes, your city guide recommended it.

Helen moved here from a town in the north of England not far from Liverpool. Before moving to Spain, she studied optometry and had lived in various cities across the UK. She has now lived away from her birth country long enough to have developed excellent Spanish-language skills, but she still starts most every day with a cup of tea and will always prefer English bacon over American bacon. No, she doesn’t want to talk about Brexit.

For over nine years (before we met), she made a life for herself. She taught English at schools and in corporations, before becoming involved in a TEFL academy. She’s built a network of friends here, both Spaniards and expats from the UK or elsewhere. She has a favorite Indian restaurant, a favorite terrace, and even a favorite apartment building (not one she’s lived in).

Wine and Whiskey

Helen and I matched on Tinder and arranged a date for a Thursday in early March of 2018. Then, as so often happens, she had to cancel due to work issues and reschedule for the following night. I agreed to the change, but I was dubious.

I hadn’t been on a date in well over a year, yet I knew, last-minute cancellations were almost always a sign that a date was never going to happen – for one reason or another. I was thus pleasantly surprised when I spotted her approaching on the street that Friday night. I had been preparing myself to be stood up.

My original idea for a stylish cocktail bar in Conde Duque floundered when the compact bar was packed. She suggested another spot a few blocks away and we wound up sitting in a brightly lit bar against a mirrored wall drinking wine (her) and whiskey (me).

Our conversation covered topics both common and less so, as first dates do. We went through the big three: Home, Family, and Why Did You End Up Here? Lulls in conversation were rare. At one point, when I inelegantly tried to explain the tone of my novel by referencing the incredibly niche book/TV series, The Leftovers, she not only knew the reference, she said she had enjoyed the show. A good sign.

Dates and Appendicitis

When, the following Friday, she invited me to meet her for drinks with her cousin and her best friend, I probably should have been freaked out – this was only our third date – but I didn’t think twice. If I had to choose between being grilled by (friendly) inquisitors or not seeing Helen, it was an easy choice.

I don’t suppose either one of us expected or even hoped there would be such a quick, thorough connection. It wasn’t based simply on similar tastes; in fact, despite having The Leftovers in common, we actually shared few pop culture points of reference. Rather, we aligned in more conceptual ways. For instance, when it came to our senses of humor, we never had to feel each other out.

We share a pugnacious investment in politics that’s tempered, somewhat, by our mutual senses of irony and pragmatism. Her reaction to the Brexit vote had been remarkably similar to my reaction to Trump’s election, even down to the celebration-turned-drunken-commiseration that we had on the nights of our respective votes. From afar, we follow the ongoing turmoil of our home countries, some days with more interest than others.

The world is a disquieting place – more often than not these days – but life goes on.

And then, on the evening of what would have been our sixth date (give or take an extended weekend), Helen had to cancel once again. This time, she told me she was headed to the hospital because of stomach pain. She was sure it was no big deal. She might even be able to still meet up with me, she said by text. When the process was taking longer than expected, she wrote:

Well the doctors are all panicking over appendicitis but my guess is it’s something less dramatic

That was a bad guess.

She went in for surgery the next morning. That same evening, I was flying out to Portugal for eight days, so I was desperate to see her that afternoon. After my persistent badgering via texts, she agreed to let me stop by. A couple of her friends who were already at the hospital rushed to throw some makeup on her before I got there, unnecessarily.

I texted her every day from Lisbon and Porto. Meanwhile, with a few more days stuck in the hospital, she read my novel. The first night after I returned, I went to see Helen the first opportunity I could. It turned out, her mother, who had come to help out during the recovery period, was there too. The three of us spent the evening together. Again, maybe a reason to be freaked out, but I wasn’t.

I knew by how I felt the moment I saw Helen again that we weren’t just dating.

A Relationship

In part because of her lack of mobility post-surgery, and in part because we just wanted to spend as much time together as possible, by the end of April, I was practically living with her. By the end of May, I was. In the first week of June, we submitted my empadronamiento with Helen’s Malasaña address to make it official.

This was the first relationship I had been in almost a decade that had staying power. If I’m being honest, it is probably the first relationship I’ve ever been in where circumstances – either within or beyond my control – aren’t precluding it from continuing. Later this year, we’ll file for pareja de hecho (de facto couple).

In almost a year together, we’ve had our ups and downs. We have fights, we sometimes struggle to communicate our perspectives to each other. But even in the arguments, what comes through is our similarity, our nearly unthinkable alignment in how we view matters, in ways both good and bad. The central frustration underneath every disagreement is that we both know how the other person would think and act if roles were reversed.

Which is why the good times are so great. We know how to make each other happy, and we’re constantly learning how to better be in each other’s presence when one or the other of us is in a bad place mentally. I’ve written quite openly (and often) about my struggles with bipolar, a disease that makes me want to hide away from everyone. I don’t want to hide away from Helen.

Which is all to say, I’m in a relationship. It’s a stable state of being, which is not common for me. It’s worth fighting for.

Puerta del Angel

On Wednesday, Helen and I moved in to her newly purchased flat in a neighborhood called Puerta del Angel. This neighborhood, that is clearly on the precipice of gentrification (whatever that means in Spain), falls on the western side of the Manzanares “river”, across from the Palacio Real. Like my first apartment in Madrid, this barrio reflects the older generations that built it, but youthful energy is moving in.

This marks the first time since I was a teenager that I’ve moved to a new apartment because of a decision someone else made. Which is not to say I’m moving because of Helen; I’m moving with Helen because it’s where I want to be.

When I lived in Chicago, I had a coworker with whom I had many conversations about love, life, and all that other stuff. One day, he told me that he imagined I’d move to Europe someday and wind up with a European woman. (This guy also said he wanted to learn how to play saxophone to impress girls, so he probably isn’t clairvoyant.) I liked that sound of that back then. I like the sound of it now.

I don’t know what comes next, other than a few more days of unpacking boxes. My 10 Cities/10 Years may only ever exist as a collection of blog posts on this site. If so, let it stand as a testament to change. The young man writing angry atheistic screeds and making silly (and fruitless) attempts at internet infamy has grown up and moved on. I changed a lot over ten years of traveling, and I celebrated that change through my project.

But some things remain the same. I’m still an atheist, I’m still internet unfamous, and I’m still in Madrid.

None of those truths are changing soon. I’m all the better for it.

Happy anniversary, LB.

History

October 17, 2017October 16, 2017 Joseph Lyttleton

We are our history.

Too complex for words, we are every casual and causal link that has built to this moment, from Adam’s dust to the steel and rubber that transports us into one another’s lives and pulls us apart.

All of human history at our fingertips and we’re stuck on the last page, reading over and over again as madmen and mad women tear it all down, to start over again or to rebuild, but not to make a better world for our children; for we are childless, and we are children.

I could cant plaintive aspirations for the future and the utopian landscapes of post-crisis self-realization, cry that you are an end in and of itself, the omega. But you don’t listen, and I’m not speaking; somehow, the silence gets filled up all the same.

We are our shared perspective, from where we see the world and agree, that yes, from up here, it does look to be burning. Or perhaps it’s just the stifling, unifying cigarette plumes of eight billion cave dwellers who have agreed that the world has little time left, so why not just light one up and wait it out. If the world doesn’t end, well, we will anyway.

We will always have our history.

Preserved in museums and memories that come back to us when the night’s libations have let us down, our history is the story of a species gradually, painfully, resiliently gaining consciousness and then, upon achieving this feat of evolution, imbibing every painkiller until we are no longer conscious.

We are our ancestors.

They cower, afraid to look up.

I tried to be a stone wall in the nuclear holocaust predicted by you, but every shadow that burned into me was just another reminder of all the ways that I am, too, human, too human, and made of skin that ripples and stains like a leaf of paper. On it, written the words you have already acknowledged as the pleas of a coward. I am shaken.

I’m stuck between wanting to tell you that you are a towering example of strength and a sharpened shard of beauty, but I know the words only get lost from my mouth to your ears; impossible to cross the divide that separates us now that you have heard it all.

I talk about history.

You talk about dying.

We both get it.

I don’t get what I’m doing here, each passing moment stretching out to eternity and then it’s tomorrow and nothing has changed; I’m still failing at everything I try to do. I could see the whole world from down here; I don’t, though.

I was sitting in your living room when I received the note; a sky so full of clouds that I thought it must be night. It was the end of a day.

Another history brought short.

Another shadow on my wall.

History is what we label that which we cannot change; this is another part of our history, even if it isn’t ours.

I go on. You go on. She go on. We go on.

And then you’re gone and I go alone.

It used to be that if “love” were spoke with enough hope, with all the power of Hannibal’s elephants and all the radiance of Chernobyl and all the precision of Oswald’s bullet, any broken heart could be mended, no matter how many times it had been shattered.

That is now a part of history, too.

So what?

So what if there’s nothing to be done? So what if our history is a collection of stolen artifacts and carefully curated facts to placate our brittle consciences? If our time is short, why shouldn’t our memories be, also?

I want this to be all okay; you, me, her/him, all with the collective sigh of our history.

It isn’t, though.

It is rotten, I know.

It isn’t true.

It only trickles through.

We are guilty

of faux civility

weak and shallow

nothing more than a show.

This is our legacy.

This is our destiny.

This is our history.

I don’t control what I’m saying. I think in couplets when I’m away from you and you are acting as though nothing has changed. Everything’s changed. You dismissed my lips, unkissed.

We have history.

You have history. It’s not easy to forget, it’s not easy to forgive, and when the cruel gray crows scatter your smile across a desolate field, it’s not easy to let go.

I am not a historian, I cannot be that detached.

Nor am I merely a supplicating audience member, waiting to applaud, steady with my tears, happy to concede defeat to the playwright. I write, too, and I don’t care if they are Shakespeare’s Histories, I make up my own endings.

You will loathe this, every word.

You will loathe me, too, and find my incessant presence to be a bother. This is already of history.

Yet, here I am, in attendance.

I bought the ticket, I took my seat, I put the world on silence for you.

So sing your song, recite your monologue, hit your mark, and kill the critics in the crowd who will insist that you’re not right for the part. The part is right for you.

I should’ve said that.

I didn’t say anything. You wept like Ophelia’s willow, threatening to drown all of Europe, but it only rains in London these days; the skies are gray, sure, but also close enough to touch. We didn’t touch. We stayed dry, we stayed indoors.

And then, that was it.

I’ve returned to this place I’m calling home now.

See the world, learn its histories, trace the rivers diverted by time and escape to the cities built on bones. Every street, every window, all of the tastes and smells, they lambast us with the history we think is behind us. Paint the walls, if you must, climb the scaffolding; it will all be history soon enough. History always wins.

We are history.

A wedding by the sea

June 20, 2017June 20, 2017 Joseph Lyttleton1 Comment

Over the weekend, I traveled through Boston to Gloucester, Massachusetts to attend the wedding of my old friend, Kate (yes, that Kate). The ceremony and reception were held at Hammond Castle, the ornate mid-20th century creation of an eccentric millionaire rocket scientist, complete with artwork imported from Europe and the Gothic vibe of a Scooby Doo haunted mansion.

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The last time I saw Kate was a week before I moved from Chicago to Nashville, some seven years ago. To say a great deal has happened in our respective lives since then would be a colossal understatement. The roads have been long and winding.

I’ve been to my share of weddings over the years, some rigidly traditional, others idiosyncratic and wholly individualized; most find a balance, maintaining the well-established structure but punctuating the traditions with unique touches or turning them on their head. Naturally, each couple has a way of injecting their personalities into the ceremony, especially those with, shall we say, strong personalities. Kate would fit into that category.

As a friend of the bride and the de facto date of one of the bridesmaids (former girlfriend), I spent most of my time in the company of Kate and her female coterie. I don’t have a lot of experience with the male version of a wedding party. I’ve never been a groomsman and the only bachelor party that I’ve been to was for my brother, a rather chaste event in every since of the word – it began with 30 minutes of prayer.

By contrast, I’m rather well acquainted with bridal parties; for reasons surpassing understanding, I tend to be closer with more brides than grooms.

Marriage: It’s, like, a whole thing

The language of marriage is steeped in notions of commitment, which is obvious, but still of interest to me: “vows” and “dedication,” “taking the plunge” and “ball and chain” (admittedly, not all the terminology has a positive connotation). Reaching back to its roots, the institution of marriage is simultaneously a business arrangement and a romantic bond, a facilitator of families and a symbolic gesture. In all its iterations, though, marriage remains a blind leap into the future, the unknown.

Blind leaps of faith are kind of my forte, and yet I find marriage almost unimaginable for myself. It’s not due to some cliché, “I don’t believe in the concept” political stance, or any desire to remain a bachelor forever. I actually find the notion of being married to the right person quite enticing, always have. Even having witnessed my share of marriages dissolve – including my parents – I still see the appeal.

What I imagine a marriage to be has changed considerably since my younger years. In my Christian youth, marriage was the end all, be all of existence. I believed all future happiness would be found within its boundaries. So powerful was this belief – and so insistently was it emphasized by my spiritual leaders – that even once I left the faith, it took me a great deal of time to shake the idea that being married with the only natural conclusion to a relationship, and by extension, to a life.

Based on my experiences, I feel I’ve had the opposite development of a lot of people. Most people spend their 20s saying they’ll never get married and then as their 30s approach, they open up to the concept. I spent much of my 20s absolutely convinced that marriage was the natural next stage in my life, but now in my 30s, I no longer put much stock in it, if only because I can imagine a life without it and – for me – it doesn’t seem like a tragedy.

There are any number of reasons why I’m not ready for marriage (besides for the obvious fact that I’m single by necessity). A more charitable person might suggest I haven’t met the right person, or haven’t reached that destination in my journey yet. If you were feeling less than charitable, you might suggest I’m just too selfish or immature to make such a commitment. All good reasons. I can’t argue with any of them.

I do know that at this moment in my life, there’s something I want more than wedded bliss, and that’s the open road. My dedication, my commitment – the plunge I will always rush to take – is travel. Honestly, I reject the idea that I’m a commitmentaphobe. At 22, I set aside ten years of my life for a travel project and I followed through with it. How many people could honestly say they could’ve successfully made a decade-long commitment to their significant other at 22?

I’m right at ten weeks from making the next big blind leap of my life, one that is even less knowable than 10 Cities/10 Years, and there are a lot of conflicting thoughts going through my head, a mix of “This is going to be amazing” and “You aren’t doing enough to prepare.” There’s so much that could go wrong; it’s what could go right that pushes me to take the risk.

Over the two days in Gloucester, I couldn’t help but see parallels to my own unknowable travels in everything that was going on around me. The excitement and fear, the uncertainty about the future and the memories of the past, the physical and mental exhaustion, all of these reactions are part and parcel with a a big move in the same way they are at a wedding. That wave of emotions is inevitable whenever you take a risk; it can become intoxicating. When it’s all said and done, we leap because we believe.

At the wedding, tears were in abundance before, during, and after the ceremony, from Kate and her groom, from the bridesmaids and the guests, and even from the officiant. There was talk of nerves and moments of stress throughout the weekend, but before the sun had set on Sunday evening, a new couple had taken the plunge together and the long path to their union was completed, one journey having reached its end, another just beginning.

Congratulations to Kate and Aaron; here’s hoping that every leap they take together only raises them higher and higher.

As for me, well, I don’t know if I’ll ever take the matrimonial leap. It’s always an option, but it’s not the only road out there. I’ve got plenty of other plunges ahead of me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1YGuOt8T9Q

Jack String and the Case of the Strange Influence

June 13, 2017June 13, 2017 Joseph Lyttleton

It’s been a busy couple of months for me. In addition to my two day jobs, I’ve been working weekends as a server and teaching an ESL class one night a week, all while trying to write (rare), study Spanish (rarer), and have a social life (so rare, it’s still mooing).

Of all those demands on my time, I’m finding teaching the most rewarding. For about three hours every Monday night, I volunteer at El Centro de Educación de Trabajadores in Hell’s Kitchen, an organization that provides a variety of services to help immigrants and those whose first language isn’t English. They provide a good community service, a necessary service, and I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to play a small part in it – as well as a little sad that next week will be the end of the quarter.

Partnered with a co-teacher, I help adult learners with first level English, teaching essential grammar and vocabulary. The students are at varying skill levels, and almost every week we’ve had a new student arrive, so there’s a lot of on-the-fly adaptation and rejiggering of lesson plans.

Every Monday morning, I leave my apartment at 8 to work a full 9-5 (5:30, really) and then immediately take the train a couple stops north to start teaching just after 6. The class ends at 9 and then I have roughly an hour ride home back to my apartment in Crown Heights. Then another six straight days of work. Sunday nights, I go to sleep exhausted just by the thought of the next day.

The strange thing – or not so strange, based on the admissions of my fellow volunteers – is that by the time class has started, I’m re-energized, excited to engage with the students, to hear about their weeks and learn more about them. They come from Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, and other locales. Every week we talk about what life is like in their home countries, what they enjoy about New York, and what differences they experience in American culture. These are the conversations I live for.

When it’s my week to lead the lesson, there’s always a wee nervous stirring in my stomach, the weight of responsibility, a sense that there’s more at stake than whether a cheeseburger comes out at the right temperature. The glimmer of excitement in someone’s eye when they understand something that only minutes before they had not is the ultimate gratuity.

I’m sad that I won’t get a second chance to work with El Centro or my co-teachers. I hope to someday return to a similar type of program, either abroad or when (if) I return to the United States. Until then, I’m grateful for the opportunity. I don’t yet think of myself as a teacher, not really, but this was an important stop on that journey.

A Puzzle with No Solution

Ms. Drake turned out to be a surprisingly pivotal person in my life’s direction. I say surprising because, when she was my sixth grade teacher, I always found her teaching style to be a bit juvenile. She decorated her classroom with color paper cutouts that looked more appropriate for kindergarteners. We also had a midday break where she would read different books to us, some of them well below my reading level. I was mostly bored in her class.

Hell, I’m providing her the pseudonym of “Ms. Drake” not to protect her identity but because I genuinely don’t remember it. She only lasted at the school one year.

And yet, Ms. Drake, my Ms. Frizzle-esque sixth grade teacher absolutely changed the course of my life.

Up until sixth grade, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a “mathematician.” I didn’t really have a concept of what that meant or how exactly doing math could manifest as a career. I just knew that I liked math problems, any math problems.

When I was still in single digits, I used to borrow my sister, Debra’s, algebra textbook and solve problems from her homework. I enjoyed all math, but algebra appealed to me the most because each problem was like a little puzzle, and boy, I loved puzzles. One summer, I took a school math book home with me to do homework so that I could advance the next year. By the time I was in sixth grade, I had leapt ahead in my math course to be in the same class as my older brother, Daniel. He loved that.

So, every day, usually coinciding with Ms. Drake’s reading period, I and another student, a much brighter boy than me named Juno, would leave our sixth grade classroom and go upstairs to join the upper level math class (our school was a private Christian institution that housed K-9 grades all in one yellow, metal barn-shaped building).

I took great pride in my math proficiency, and was more than a little bit of a shithead about it with my older siblings. But since I was a mortally shy and uneasy kid, it’s all I had; it was my entire identity, other than being the youngest boy from a messed up family – which I also took a weird kind of pride in.

Having that one thing to hang my hat on was very important because sixth grade was also the year puberty body slammed my groin like a Republican congressman and I discovered the most magnificent of life’s horrors: falling in love.

Her name was Laura. She wasn’t the first girl I’d had a crush on. That was Melanie in kindergarten, and there’d been others. But Laura was the first girl for whom seeing her enter the room made me feel like I was dying and being born at the same time. My crush on her is probably the reason I can’t remember Ms. Drake’s real name or most other things going on in my life from sixth grade through much of junior high: she outshone everything else.

As a chunky 11-year-old, I was not a smooth talker, and I was not cute, at least not to sixth grade girls. I was confident that Laura – and every other girl for that matter – was in love with my best friend at the time, Aaron, an athletic, naturally popular kid. That’s how I envisioned him; I’m sure his memory is far less charitable, as no one remembers their pubescent years fondly.

I went through that entire year in complete devastation, certain that I was invisible to Laura, though I know for sure that she actually did notice me: I was the jerk who made up some stupid, rude nickname for her. That’s right, I was the cliché, the boy who didn’t know how to talk to his crush so he insulted her instead. This was the beginning of a phase where, when I couldn’t think of anything funny or witty to say, I would just be mean. I expect that phase to end any day now.

There I was, in love with this incomparable beauty (there are few comparison points for an 11-year-old, Christian boy), and completely unable to break through the barrier between us. I’d met the unsolvable puzzle.

This is where Ms. Drake comes in.

In addition to the reading period, Ms. Drake would also set aside a portion of the day for us to write in our journals. We could write whatever we wanted, and at the end, those who wished to could read what they’d written aloud to the class. I’d never really done any personal writing before, never had a diary or anything, but I took to this activity with gusto.

During one of these writing periods, I created my first character: Jack String, a bumbling idiot of a private eye who always managed to solve his cases by pure dumb luck. I’m not sure where the character came from, but like most everything else about me at that age, I’m sure I stole it from something I watched on TV.

Feeling confident one day, I volunteered to read my Jack String story to the class. That’s when it happened, the most perfect, most beautiful, purest life-sustaining moment of my paltry existence: I read the silly story and the class laughed. Nay, Laura laughed. That was it. Fuck math, I was a writer.

Writing was powerful, it was world changing. It made me funny. Once Jack String came to life on the page, he became all I wanted to write about, all I wanted to do. Entering his world offered the briefest of respites from my uncertain real life. (Years later, when I unearthed the original Jack String pages, I was shocked to find that these “short stories” where barely two paragraphs long.)

As I grew older, Jack String transformed into a more dour detective until I abandoned the character altogether. Though I had loved reading Encyclopedia Brown and other detective stories, it turned out I was lousy at manufacturing meaningful mysteries of my own. My fiction grew less plot heavy as I developed as a writer, more character based. The humor also changed, from pratfalls to sardonic quips that are really only funny to me. It turns out, my sixth grade self knew how to entertain an audience better than current me.

Laura and I became “friends” throughout high school but it was always a walled off kind of relationship. At 18, when I read my poetry for the first time in front of an older, rowdy audience at the Jazzhaus, I invited her as my guest, hoping not too subtly that my exquisite words would wow the audience and capture her heart.

We were the only under-agers allowed in (my brother, Steve, ran the show) and we drank Cherry Cokes together at our separate table. When it was my turn to read, I sheepishly worked my way through the narrow passages between the swiveling chairs and up onto the spotlighted stage.

There I stood, a stick figure child with the blondest of long blond hair, standing before a drunken crowd of adults. I cleared my throat in preparation of reading truly terrible poetry, but before I could get any words out, a disembodied voice from the darkness hollered, “Hey, Hanson!” The crowd exploded into hoots and guffaws. I turned beet red, and then grew redder. Apparently I could still get a laugh as a writer.

Dripping sweat, I managed to mumble out my angsty couplets before leaving the stage to polite clapping. I sat through the rest of the show, every few minutes looking at Laura with a twitchy smile, but there was nothing to be done, nothing to salvage. I’m pretty sure that was the last time I saw Laura.

For all that humiliation, for all the social anxiety, I have Ms. Drake to thank. But, sincerely so. Getting up on that stage and being roundly embarrassed was a necessary experience. I went up almost every week for the next three years, and eventually grew more comfortable performing before an audience, even if the poetry didn’t improve. It was facing that fear that led the groundwork for other major leaps that I would make in my life, particularly 10 Cities/10 Years.

It’s a strange influence that a teacher can have on a student’s life (and a preposterous society that doesn’t revere and support its teachers). If you were to ask me which teachers I’ve learned the most from or who I had the most admiration for, Ms. Drake wouldn’t be the first to pop into my head, and yet, truly, no other teacher sparked such a fundamental and lasting passion in me.

It’s crazy to think, if not for Ms. Drake, I might be an engineer instead of a writer.

I hope she’s sorry.

Epilogue

May 16, 2017August 12, 2022 Joseph Lyttleton6 Comments

“Are you happy?” She asked me.

It’s been nearly two years since I reached the end of 10 Cities/10 Years. My first year in New York came to an end, and a second one started with little fanfare. I had girded myself for a come down period, but I wasn’t prepared for it to come so soon, or so brutally. Apparently, ten years of moving had trained my body to crave change and it didn’t react well to being deprived.

It was the deepest mental crash I’d experienced since New Orleans, triggering a complete emotional and physical exhaustion. My first year in Brooklyn had been exhilarating, but now everything curdled in my vision as I felt walls closing in. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have a goal. I needed purpose.

One Last Story

We barely spoke to each other as Ruth drove me back to my Bed-Stuy apartment. This would be her first time coming to my neighborhood with me. She wasn’t staying. We pulled up to my front door, parking briefly. I leaned over, kissed her goodnight, and then, before opening the door, paused.

“This is over, isn’t it?” I asked.

We met on a dating app.

A week after I moved to Brooklyn, I downloaded the Tinder app to my phone. A week later, I went on my first Tinder date. That woman cheerfully offered to give me a tour of Brooklyn. We walked around on a drizzly end-of-summer Saturday, had a few drinks, and exchanged the details of our lives. It was the prototypical first date.

Our second date was a concert. We had a pleasant but unspectacular time before kissing goodnight. Then she went out of town and when she returned, she texted me that it wasn’t a good time for a relationship (I later learned this was a common dating trick: use a trip out of town to ghost an unwanted date). I said I understood and moved on. I ignored the app for another year.

It was a couple months after Sophie left that I tried Tinder again. As it turns out, my life is great fodder for casual conversation – one Tinderalla called it “the perfect first date story,” and she had a point. If a conversation was stalling on a date, I could turn the subject to some city I had lived in and it would open up all new avenues.

Dates came in waves. Some weeks, I saw two or three different women, and other weeks all matches went ignored. There were numerous first dates, a smattering of second ones, and on a few occasions, I made it to a third. The fourth remained out of reach. It got to the point that getting past the third date seemed like a milestone.

I’m certainly not the first person to feel that dating apps essentially make a game of the whole endeavor. With each fleeting connection, as the fourth date grew more elusive, it started to reinforce that game mentality, with each date feeling like a level to be reached and beat. There was a goal to be achieved. But I kept dying at the same spot. Reset.

Though a lot could certainly happen in between a first and third date, I convinced myself that what I wanted – a lasting relationship, a reason to stay, a purpose for a life in Brooklyn – waited right on the other side.

Yeah I was losing, but I was having fun playing all the same. There were good conversations, making out, even a couple one-night stands. Some connections felt more substantial than others, and it was disappointing when they fizzled out. Trysts were a nice enough distraction, but I was, perhaps naively, hoping for more. I’d spent the previous decade ricocheting between wildly impractical love affairs and loneliness. I was ready to try a stable relationship. Didn’t I deserve one?

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I decided to expand my pool of dates by downloading Bumble, an app practically identical to Tinder except that it requires women to start the conversation. It appealed to my shy nature and I appreciated that it gave women more control. I’ve seen enough Tinder Nightmare posts to feel bad for every women, ever. The connections on Bumble were, indeed, better. It was harder to get to the first date, but when I did, it didn’t feel like we were wasting each other’s time, even when it didn’t go anywhere.

I connected with Ruth on Bumble in June. For our first date, over drinks and appetizers, we talked literature and our different upbringings – she grew up in New York City and had lived there most of her life – and when the night was over, I walked her to her bus. Our second date was a sushi dinner in Brooklyn Heights. Afterwards, we walked along the Promenade and kissed in the glare of passing traffic.

Our third date took place at a Celebrate Brooklyn concert in Prospect Park. She arrived fifteen minutes late, and partially into the date, one of her friends joined us. This felt like a signal, the brush off, so I was surprised when she proffered an invitation to her Cobble Hill place following the concert. The next morning, we made tentative plans for a fourth date.

As that night approached, I anticipated a text saying she was sick or she had to work, any of a dozen excuses I’d been given by past connections. Instead, she arrived (late) for dinner. The date itself wasn’t particularly interesting – we saw a movie she didn’t enjoy and then returned to her place – but we had reached a fourth date. It felt momentous.

More dates followed, usually ending at her place. I met her friends and her parents, even attended her father’s poetry reading. She went out of town for a week around the 4th of July and when she returned she didn’t blow me off. She had me over on a particularly scorching Wednesday night and cooked us dinner. My friends, who hadn’t met Ruth, took to referring to her as my “girlfriend.”

The following Saturday, we returned to Prospect Park for another concert. She was late again. From the moment she arrived, I could sense her absence. I knew she had just received some upsetting family news so I chalked it up to that. Back at her place later that night, though, she turned to me and confessed in her matter-of-fact way, “I feel ambivalent about you.”

She clarified that she wasn’t disinterested, just uncertain. She had strong feelings about me in opposite directions. I suppose she thought that would be reassuring. As best she could articulate, my best quality appeared to be that I was “nice.” Never a good sign.

We hashed out our feelings for maybe an hour and the next morning the tension had dissipated. We went to a neighborhood coffee shop to work next to each other. If felt like a couple thing to do. I’d started to relax when, as we walked back to her apartment, she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and said, with a pitying smile, “I don’t want you to worry about how I feel.”

Yeah right.

We didn’t talk again until Thursday night when I received an unexpected call from her. I’d spent the week bracing for her to end things, so I was shocked when she invited me to join her and a group of friends for a weekend trip upstate.

The weekend was almost perfect. There was swimming in a pond and climbing waterfalls. We cooked BBQ and drank, roasted s’mores and played games. Group conversations covered religion, politics, and art. The trip felt like a turning point; Ruth appeared to be giving me admission into her group of friends. It was somewhere to belong.

And yet, I could still sense it: Ruth’s ambivalence.

The next weekend, we went to see Louis CK perform (this was well before the accusations of misconduct were public). She picked me up, arriving early this time, and drove us to the show out in Forest Hills. On the way, I noticed her respond to a message on Bumble. Ruth’s distance was palpable – while waiting in line, I tried to hold her hand and she pulled away. We both laughed heartily through Louis’ typically brilliant set, even as he touched on the uncomfortably relevant topic of doomed relationships.

She took me home – she had an excuse for why I couldn’t come over that night – an interminable drive. Sitting mostly in silence, I spent the time working up the nerve to ask the question I knew would end our nascent relationship. After I asked her if it was over and she answered in the affirmative, we talked for another ten minutes, exchanging only a few words. While she didn’t feel strongly for me, she couldn’t bring herself to break up with me. I had to break up with myself.

“I don’t want you to be sad,” she said as I prepared to exit her car. I almost managed a grin. She had never had a say in that.

We’d only been seeing each other a month and a half.

I was, of course, sad after the break up, but not devastated. Even in the moment I could recognize that we had never really clicked as a couple, and that I had placed undue weight on the relationship because of that arbitrary fourth date milestone. I was rushing towards a fabricated resolution because I wanted there to be an endgame.

Ruth was a smart and funny woman, independent and focused. She had her failings, everyone does, but they were irrelevant. She was a reminder of the greatest gift that 10 Cities/10 Years had given me: a surplus of remarkable, strong women in my life. So many, in fact, that in these chapters, I’ve barely scratched the surface. There are so many more stories left untold.

I count myself incredibly lucky for all the women who have come into my life, some for only a matter of months (or days), others for years, and maybe even life. Their perspective has changed me for the better, their support sustained me, their creativity, grace, and beauty invigorated me when I had lost the will to continue. 10 Cities/10 Years was a journey from boyhood to manhood, and women were my guide.

A couple months after Ruth exited my life, my travel companion, Emily, and I took a trip to Spain together. I had a revelation. Upon returning to the States, I deleted Bumble. I resolved to forgo dating for the next year in order to save for a move abroad, a decision that was met with some skepticism by my friends. But if there’s one thing more enticing to me than love, it’s the road.

I thought that when I reached New York I would feel a sense of place, of purpose. I believed that the city would be a star of too great a gravity to escape, that I would finally find a home. And I do feel at home in Brooklyn, I do feel a sense of belonging. Maybe I could be happy and in love here. Why not?

But I haven’t reached the end of the road.

Now I get asked a lot, “What’s the plan?” How long will I be in Spain? What will I do after that? When will I come back? The answer, to all questions, is, I don’t know. There isn’t a plan this time; no goal, no purpose. I’m going because it’s where I want to be right now. That’s enough.

I’m not looking for a destination, anymore. It can find me if it wants to.

“Are you happy?” She asked me. This woman who had been the center of my world at one point had all but vanished from my life. We hadn’t spoken in years. She has a good life now, a happy one. The life she deserves. I may never be a part of it again.

I couldn’t answer her question. I’ve never been able to. The answer isn’t yes or no, it’s a treatise.

I’m alive. For however long as that’s still true, it’ll suffice.

Read the whole book.

A photo of Brooklyn Bridge in black and white

The Art of Jumping

May 9, 2017June 27, 2023 Joseph Lyttleton40 Comments

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[Names are whatever I want them to be]

I spent much of my youth with a group of boys, which explains why I was such a surly kid. Following church one Sunday afternoon, where the message had been “Good Ideas vs. God Ideas” (your wisdom or God’s wisdom), a group of us gathered at a buddy’s place to hang out and be teenage boys.

From a tall tree in that friend’s backyard, a zip line had been attached that shot across the yard to a patch of grass a dozen or so yards off. This bright summer day, the boys were taking turns riding, but there was a hold out: Dylan. No matter how much the other boys badgered him, Dylan wouldn’t ride the line.

“I don’t think it’s safe,” he protested.

“Well, maybe that’s a good idea,” a kid named Chet intoned, “but is it a God idea?”

It says something about Christian youth that, even as a joke, that line still worked: Dylan climbed the tree. I surmise the jumping off spot for the zip line must have been roughly three stories, though details are fuzzy: let’s say at least 25 feet. By the point Dylan was stepping up to the ledge, at least four or five other boys had already ridden the line.

Effectively goaded, Dylan stepped out of the tree, putting all of his faith in the strength of the line, and immediately dropped. The line snapped. He hit the ground like a rock.

There is an art to jumping out of a tree, and Dylan apparently had forgotten it: Instead of bending his legs and rolling with the momentum, he locked his knees and came straight down on his feet. Following that fall, Dylan spent the next few weeks in a wheelchair, though nothing was broken, only bruised.

When Dylan hit the ground, he went fetal, writhing in pain. The rest of us were frozen in a mixture of shock and awe until Chet broke the silence with the soundest theological statement I’ve ever heard:

“Maybe it was a God idea.”

Meet Cute

I met Sophie the way all New Yorkers meet: outside a Williamsburg coffee shop after attending an independent movie premiere. This short film, about the Manson Family, had been created by a friend and his theater troupe. At 30 minutes, it was an artfully shot re-enactment of rape and murder, a feel good romp if ever there was one.

Sophie, not part of the troupe but involved in theater, had a role in the film. The post-screening party was being hosted at a nearby Starbucks that also served alcohol. When the only two people I knew were otherwise engaged, I wound up outside conversing with a group that included Sophie and another woman, Amy.

With the party unwinding, Sophie, Amy, and I, joined by some guy named Stan, continued our night at Rosemary’s around the corner. As tends to happen with the male of the species, once in a booth, Stan brashly hijacked the conversation and soon the ladies and I were communicating telepathically to make our escape.

After telling Stan we were calling it a night, the three of us left in different directions and then, ten minutes later, regrouped outside the bar. Sophie suggested that we prolong the night back at her Greenpoint apartment. Though late, her place was just past McCarren Park, so we hoofed it.

Along the way, the conversation turned to my Kansas youth and the topic of climbing trees.

“Everyone climbs trees in Kansas,” I likely said, because this is factually accurate.

“I never have,” Sophie admitted. It was a confession, but, since alcohol was involved, also a challenge.

The London Planetrees lining the park weren’t as sturdy as the cottonwoods I had grown up with, but they’d do. Showing surprising dexterity, I scurried up one and straddled the lowest hanging limb. Proud that I could still get up a tree in my 30s, I jumped out with ease, a height of maybe eight feet. It was Sophie’s turn, now.

We selected a suitable option and with a little assistance from Amy and I, Sophie scampered up the tree’s white tree trunk. As she settled into the nook between its three branching limbs, her expression was a mixture of relief and mild terror.

Reveling in the absurdity of our endeavor, I neglected to mention the most important part of climbing a tree: the dismount. Leaving Sophie in her perch, Amy and I chatted a few feet away when, in our peripheral, we saw Sophie come sailing down.

The art of jumping out of a tree is best learned when you’re a child and your body is made out of rubber. You might start by cautiously sliding your ass along the trunk until you’re on the ground with a scratched up back, or maybe you just take a haphazard leap and limp off the impact. Eventually, having done it enough times, you develop a second nature for it.

Having never climbed a tree in her youth, Sophie wasn’t practiced in this particular skill. Landing firmly on her ankles, she crumbled to the ground. Amy and I raced to her side and helped her up. Attempting to put weight on her right foot, Sophie yelped in pain.

“I think I broke my foot,” she fretted.

Imbued with the confidence of manhood and alcohol, I replied, “I doubt it. You probably just bruised your ankle.”

Though she was in evident pain – just how much, I didn’t realize at the time – we continued walking to Sophie’s apartment, she directing from the rear. Once there, we poured more drinks while Sophie elevated her leg. Removing her boot proved a struggle as her foot had ballooned inside. Now a discolored rainbow, I nonetheless surmised with my expert medical opinion that it was a minor injury. With enough ice, she’d be fine in a day or two.

A little later, I passed out on the couch while the two women talked. In the morning, Amy urged Sophie to see a doctor, but she was reluctant and I was still confident that it was unnecessary. However, since Sophie was struggling to walk and Amy had to go to work, I volunteered to hang out for the day. It was Friday morning, I didn’t work again until Saturday afternoon.

We whiled away the hours conversing and watching television on her couch. We ordered Chinese food for lunch. When the dog needed to go out, I walked him. There was such an easy, natural tempo to our conversation that we never hit a lull, whether we talked family, politics, or art. We delved into our pasts, those dark passages that few others ever saw. The sun rose and fell across her apartment’s bay windows.

It was almost dusk and the progression of the day had brought us together, our legs touching as I argued with myself whether or not I should kiss her. It seemed a foregone conclusion, but I’d been wrong before.

Glancing at me sideways, Sophie inquired, “So… is it wrong to fuck a cripple?”

I laughed.

Friday became Saturday. I made a few half-hearted efforts to exit throughout the morning, eventually leaving some time after noon to return to my Bed-Stuy apartment and get ready for work.

In my absence, a worried Amy returned and brought Sophie to urgent care. That night at work, I received a text:

My foot is broken.

I’d been in Brooklyn for eight months.

Flashback

New York City couldn’t possibly live up to my fantasies, to the extended nine year tease I had put myself through; and yet, in many ways, it somehow did. Every free afternoon, I walked the borough, barely scratching Brooklyn’s 97 square miles. There was art and music and the quintessential melting pot of diverse residents. My first full weekend in the city, I saw Spoon play a rollicking concert in Central Park while the sun set over the treetops. Purely cinematic.

Shortly after my arrival, I attended a rooftop party at my apartment and met a young French photographer studying in the city for the semester. We had a brief, caustic affair and then she returned to Paris. Meanwhile, I served tables in Park Slope, one of the many neighborhoods in Brooklyn where the locals will proudly tell you how it had once been a much different, rougher neighborhood. Now, their dog walkers make six figures a year.

Naturally, New York tried to kick my ass. That’s what it does. It’s impatient and unkind, expensive and exclusive, unimpressed by anything you’ve ever done. The city doesn’t need you or want you, thank you very much; although, it’ll gladly have another meal.

And this is the easy version of New York City. Most everyone will report with nostalgia how much harder – and better – this city used to be. Nothing will ever be greater than the past.

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Montage

Sophie’s broken foot complicated matters. She could no longer continue her theater internship, her main reason for being in the city. A job was out of the question and she was essentially immobile, Brooklyn being hostile to the hobbled. When not working, I was invariably with her.

After a few weeks, we attempted a visit to my apartment, a fourth floor walk-up. Our collective restiveness induced Sophie to push herself – and her foot – sooner than she should have. Every time Sophie thought her cast could come off, a new complication extended her recovery. As the weeks turned into months, my guilt grew exponentially, her every grimace a reminder that I had played an active role in her agony.

Sophie was immensely frustrated by her lack of mobility and her inability to take advantage of New York City’s lucrative theater network. She sought other avenues for pursuing her artistic ambitions. Having no great affinity for the city, no reason to chain herself to New York, she figured “why not?” and applied to numerous graduate schools, most of them in England where she had spent much of her childhood.

Though we were simpatico on most every level, our nights occasionally flipped from romantic to adversarial seemingly on a dime. We shared ideals, but some conversational tangents could splinter us, as tends to happen with any two headstrong people. Scotch might have been a factor.

Everything between us felt emotionally charged, whether discussing our pasts or our ill-defined futures, during physical intimacy or a heated argument. She challenged me, as a writer, as a thinker, as a man. She could infuriate me – and I her – but conversations with her never ended without me questioning my assumptions, and that’s a rare talent.

She was just as talented as a writer. Every grad school she applied to, most of them prestigious, accepted her. She had her pick of the litter. She was to be in England by September.

At the end of July, not even three months after we met, and less than a week after having her cast removed, Sophie flew to Washington to spend time with family before her next journey.

I don’t suppose either one of us thought we were built for the long-term. We’d both been nomads. So much of the fire between us was in the immediacy, the sense that neither one of us had ever known permanence – maybe we never would – but at least for a few hours together the outside world’s beckoning wasn’t so loud.

I would have taken more time with her, but she couldn’t stay. New York City wasn’t where she belonged; it wasn’t where she was going to make her mark. And she’ll make her mark. She’s a resolute woman, audacious in her convictions. She was always going to jump; I can’t wait to see her land.

Like few others, Sophie’s voice continues to ring in my ears. It’s the voice of my conflicting internal monologue, challenging my opinions and making me step back from my preconceptions. It’s telling me to listen more, speak less. I’m still debating with Sophie in my head, and she’s still winning.

The Final Reel

For the final week of 10 Cities/10 Years, as my first year in New York City came to an end, I hit the road with Emily. She was moving back west, from Boston to Los Angeles, after graduating from nursing school. Our route this time took us through Kansas where we spent a night with my family before continuing to see her brother in Flagstaff and on to Long Beach.

I stayed with Emily’s family for a couple days and revisited Costa Mesa where I met up with Selene who’d recently moved back home. After all the cities, all my experiences over the past decade, it felt like the pieces were being reset with the project’s conclusion. Maybe there would be nothing to show for the effort. No matter, that’s life.

On the last Saturday of August, I returned to New York to be alone.

There’s one detail I left out of Dylan’s story. Another kid didn’t ride the zip line that day: Me. I was just as scared as he was; more so, because not even God could get me up that tree. No one ever called me a particularly adventurous child, which is why I’m sure it surprised more than a few people when I embarked on this journey.

Ten years of constant uncertainty, of impending financial ruin and personal angst – of being out on a limb – and I am no less afraid than when I set out. Anxiety still roils my gut when I enter an unfamiliar social situation, whether it be a new job or a packed bar. The self-doubts, the fear, it never abates.

I live with that fear every day, and I always will. It’s my main reason for climbing trees: so I’ll have to jump.